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"3tip-of-the-day" Posts

Using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk in combination with outsourcing your design task to Elance, you can get great designs and user feedback very quickly, easily and for very little money.

Step 1: Post your job “design a logo” on Elance (elance.com). Be sure to include instructions including other designs that inspire you and a description of your product vision and intended audience.

Step 2: After selecting a designer, ask them to create 3 to 5 draft design mocks

Step 3: Using mechanical turk (mturk.com), submit each design option to mechanical turk as a survey (e.g. “which design do you like best”). You can choose any number of people to answer your survey. Estimated cost: 100 people at $0.10 each = $10

Step 4: Review results.

I’ve found that using this technique that for about $10 I can get around 100 people to tell me which design they prefer and offer suggestions. Also, I usually ask for the age, country and background of the participant so I can filter down to an audience that matches my purposes.

Sprouts is a tool that helps you get a Flex development environment setup quickly, and helps automate development, testing, and deployment.

Sprouts is an open source project that uses Ruby to make Flex development easier. If you’ve ever used Ruby on Rails or a similar framework, you may be familiar with project generation. In fact the sprouts code generator, rubigen, was extracted from Rails. For those who are used to Java development, Sprouts can be likened to Maven.

Sprouts can not only generate a project, but fetch and install dependencies similar to a package management tool such as RPM. It will even install the Flex SDK and Flash debug player if you don’t have them installed. Sprouts provides wrappers around tools such as MXMLC and COMPC (and recently even FDB) to faciliate automation. It also helps encourage best practices such as unit testing by helping create a framework for executing tests with asunit and integrating with continuous integration tools such as CruiseControl.rb.

What follows is a typical pattern of usage with Sprouts based on the tutorial.

1. Generate a project:

sprout -n as3 MyProject

This builds the basic directory structure and a simple ActionScript 3 application.

2. Execute:

cd MyProject
rake

This will run the project, but even better, will download and install dependencies, and set up your environment configuration.

Rake, I as I mentioned, is a ruby build program (think ant or make) But it isn’t just for Ruby. It’s part of the power behind sprouts. You don’t have to know Ruby to use Rake, but you’ll probably learn a little bit without even realizing it.

Rubygems is the package installer used by ruby, and also used by sprouts to install your Flex development dependencies. It’s another part of the secret sauce, and it just works. Similar tools include ivy (for Java), cpan (for perl), or pear (for php).

3. Generate code:

script/generate myPackage.MyClass

You don’t need to know how rubigen works to use it, but you might find yourself learning a bit about it to build your own generators. It’s not that daunting.

4. Test your code:

rake test

This will execute your unit tests. What tests, you say? When sprouts generated your class, it also generated tests to go with it. Of course the tests will fail until you implement the tests (and functionality to make them pass.)

Sprouts also has tasks to help you deploy a project. For instancing, zip and sftp wrappers.

This tip was provided by Aaron E, during our submit a tip contest.

So for the most part… up to this point I haven’t really needed to use extensive Flash animations within Flex. I mean like most people, I’ve embedded swf assets into my Flex application by using the [Embed] metadata tag. However, using the Embed metadata tag, in my opinion, is for static assets or simple animations… you know… images, animation only swfs, fonts, etc…

Today I found a cool button that I wanted to use in my Flex application.

The button (roll your mouse over me):

The thing about this button is that it has complex roll over and roll out animations. Of course we could create the same thing within Flex using an ActionScript tween class… but some things are better left to the Flash timeline.

So how do we get our button into Flex, with all of its animation and interactivity intact? The answer, my friends, is to use Adobe’s Flex Component Kit.

Doing some research online, it’s not really clear where to get it, or how to use it. According to labs, it’s released within Flex 3… but I don’t have a clue where. So we’re going to do this my way…

Step 1 : Install Adobe Extension Manager 2.1

Obviously, you can skip this step if you already have Extension Manager 2.1 installed.